SCUDETTO SCRAPBOOK

SCUDETTO SCRAPBOOK

End of the line

The atmosphere at Fiorentina’s Artemio Franchi is something to behold and a reminder of the good that Italian football has to offer

In the final stages of his scrapbook, Giancarlo Rinaldi sums up his memories with a look at the balance between his positive and negative memories of the Italian game

In the final stages of his scrapbook, Giancarlo Rinaldi memories with a look at the balance between his positive and negative memories of the Italian game

Serie A is not all about the superstars, as players like Empoli’s Fabio Moro all add to the fabric of calcio

If there is something sportswriters struggle with, it is genuine tragedy. We so routinely use such terms when describing a game that when confronted with death or disaster it is hard to find the right words. And in a career spent celebrating the vibrancy and vitality of football, it is hard to turn the pen to more sombre matters. The first time I can remember my favourite game making me feel physically ill was watching events unfold at Heysel. Up until then, I think, I had lived in a bubble where my definition of tragedy had been watching Italy slump out of the 1978 World Cup to two long-range strikes from Holland. Now I was confronted with a real disaster which would take sport from the back pages on to the front. Suddenly, I asked myself, what was this game all about? And was it really worth playing it at all if it was going to cost so many lives? The game went on between Juventus and Liverpool that night and the Italian team won.

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I should have been celebrating – but any joy I felt seemed shallow and pointless. Fast forward more than 20 years and the death of Filippo Raciti provided the same sensation of hollow emptiness. After a lifetime spent fighting the corner of Italian football how could you defend this behaviour? The scenes in Sicily made me feel sick. Was it really worth bothering kicking a ball around in front of fans if this was what it produced? In between times there have been other incidents that have seen my faith in football waver. Mostly it has been through fan violence, but sometimes it has been the death of a young player in a motorway smash or the latest scandal to rock Serie A. Every time I have come back to the game I love, but changed in some way. The last few months have been a real rollercoaster for anyone who cares about the Italian game. Just when it seemed that we were heading for a special summer, the Calciopoli scandal broke with its full force. This represented a double disaster for anyone holding the game dear. Firstly, there was the undoubted impact that it was going to have on some top teams in Serie A. But, secondly, it further tarnished the reputation of Italian football in the eyes of the wider world.

The last few months have been

Italian football in the eyes of the wider

The riots at the Catania-Palermo game were a painful reminder of how tragedy can touch the game

Legends like Paolo Rossi - a World Cup hero even after being tainted by scandal - may have grown old, but we remember them as they were in their glory days

For those of us a bit longer in the tooth and lesser of hair, of course, we realised it had always been this way. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, many an Italian European triumph was the subject of corruption claims. And back in 1982, the Azzurri took Paolo Rossi with them to Spain – fresh after his part in a match-fixing scandal. The number of clubs caught trying to buy their way out of trouble or pay their way to success has been significant.

Despite all its flaws, I believe that there remains a special element to the Italian game

It almost seems that calcio is a microcosm of Italian society in general. ‘Eppur si muove’ – somehow it goes forward – they used to say about the country as a whole. Politics in the peninsula seems to lurch from one crisis to another with the same people staying in power. Businesses appear to collapse and yet are reborn even bigger and stronger. Football mirrors the nation in that respect. It is as if the sport needs a major scandal every few years just to purify its system and move on. In truth, there was much of Calciopoli, which even now, strikes me as a typically Italian disaster. In other countries, the dirty laundry would have been done in private without hundreds of intercepted phone calls becoming public. I suspect that everywhere around the sporting world there are plenty of equally

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